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Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Week end in Vichy with Napoleon III

The last April week-end, before the big start of the season, we went to my home town of Vichy to visit my Parents.
I chose this week end for the special festivities that were happening and that I always missed....

This week end took place the 8th edition of the fêtes de Napoleon III.
Vichy was known as a spa since the roman times and hosted many rich and famous through the past centuries but developped like a mushroom after the first visit of Napoleon III in the 1860's.
He loved the place so much that he invested a lot of time in that beautiful spa resort and even had famous Baron Hausman to help on the new city development. The Casino, the new church, the train station, the famous chalets, the new parc along the Allier river are still here to prove the love of Vichy from our emperor.
Vichy became then "the spot to be" in the summer time and Palaces mushroomed from then on until the second world war.
In the early 20th Century, the most expensive hotel rooms were indeed in Vichy and not in Paris.
And in 1939, Vichy offered 12 000 hotel rooms, 2 casinos, many cinemas and shops as Van Cleef, Louis Vuiton, etc...

Now a little sleepy town, full of parc, greenery and gorgeous buildings, it is a perfect spot when you want to reverse back to the late 19th Century.

We could only make it to the Sunday festivity and missed the previous day activities (Chef at our local market cooking as in the emperor times for ex).

We headed to the Casino were a conference was about to start

Walked down the Napoleon I (that he created for his mum and sisters' pleasure when in Vichy)

Towards the Parc Napoleon III alongside our river

There we were the witness of a "Gun Duel" between two gentlemen as one of them got too close to the other's wife...